Teaching the practical aspects of engineering to potential engineers is a very important part of their education and it may also play a key role in their understanding of the engineering courses taught at universities. This paper describes how a virtual instrumentation based laboratory can be used to teach undergraduate students in "Metrology and Quality Engineering" at the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department of the Technical University of Lodz. The low cost involved in building the laboratory was achieved by setting it up as a multifunctional flexible laboratory with shared resources. The individual work areas are connected via an INTRANET and can also be made available on the INTERNET, although there are some minor limitations while experiment are being performed at different remote locations. The experimental work areas each have PC based computer equipment which is grouped into three types of experimental benches: the first is equipped with a multifunction I/O or dedicated PCI cards, the second with desk top instrumentation and the third as a calibration work station. All student work areas, or benches, are supported by the full version of LabView® Ver. 6 software. These three groups form a kind of bank of instruments and are accessible from other computers, local or remote. The master stations, equipped with a MIO cards, are configured in such a way that the individual channels of the multifunction I/O cards can be assigned to individual PCs on the local net or distinct computers using a TCP/IP protocol. Sharing of a complete MIO PCI card is quite obvious, but access to individual channels on one PCI MIO card is a new idea and therefore had to be develop here at Lodz, exclusively for this application in our laboratory. The subjects supported by the virtual instrumentation are listed in the paper and the importance to quality engineering is highlighted and emphasised in the paper. The laboratory, as described, can facilitate distance learning in a practical way in many engineering subject areas.

The paper presents the experience of the team of the Technical University of Gdansk (TUG), Chair of the Electrical Measurements in using Virtual Instruments for educational purposes. These instruments can be used with great success for demonstration different physical phenomena during the lectures, especially to present different rapid effects in slow down time scale. They form marvellous help in understanding many theoretical problems. The virtual instruments can also be used in the virtual home laboratory, which enables students better preparation for real laboratory tasks. It is also possible to design specialised instruments for practical works in students laboratories and to substitute stand alone instruments which are sometimes inaccessible due to anxious financial situation of our faculty.

Students need be well trained in performing correct measurements. This paper reports on a training program in which emphasis is put on a critical attitude with respect to the whole measurement process. A meticulous analysis of the measurement environment, the measurement devices and the signal processing are prerequisites for an unambiguous interpretation of the measurement results. These skill are trained using a complete system built up in modules that can be studied separately. Error analysis is part of the training program and is performed on a real measurement.

Attractive implementations of DSP tools for measurement can improve students’ interests for deeper study of signals theory. The experiment set-up is based on standard equipment that the students can find at home. The application of DSP tools should show them importance of random signal analysis and hardware implementation issues.

A project-oriented course is described in which teams of students learn to apply knowledge from lectures on measurement, system simulation and transducer technology by creating in a structured way original mechatronic systems. Starting point of the project is a specific transducer that first has to be fully characterised by measurements and modelling. A next step is the design of a mechatronic system using this transducer. The design must be evaluated, simulated and finally built, validated and demonstrated. Students follow in a creative atmosphere a strict design trajectory while learning to act in a team (4 persons), to organise themselves, and to be successful despite deadlines (2 weeks) and limited resources.